Event draws over 100 leading government, industry, and academic leaders to further translational applications of 3D tissue models.

Experts in next-generation 3D cell culture gathered at the inaugural New Frontiers in 3D Cell Culture-based Screening Technologies Conference, held Thursday, October 13 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. Conceived and organized by InSphero AG, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), the Centers for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), and Promega Corporation, the first annual conference brought together thought leaders from major disciplines to discuss application of 3D tissue models to improve in vitro assays used for drug discovery and toxicity testing.

Michael Gottesman, MD, Chief of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the National Cancer Institute and Deputy Director for Intramural Research, National Institutes of Health, and Thomas Hartung, MD, PhD of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Director of CAAT, delivered keynote presentations at the one-day event. Themed sessions featured presentations from some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical, regulatory, and academic research groups working with 3D model systems, including Novartis, the Hubrecht Institute, Merck, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), Pfizer, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Innsbruck, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Gottesman, whose research interests include mechanisms by which cancers become resistant to chemotherapy, reinforced in his keynote address that traditional monolayer cell culture models used to study tumor chemoresistance have proven to be woefully inadequate. Gottesman noted, “It should come as no surprise that the world of cell culture is not flat. The meeting was an opportunity to learn about some of the new and exciting advances in 3D cell culture and appreciate the importance of this new technology in studying normal and abnormal cell behavior.”

Jens Kelm, PhD, InSphero Chief Technology Officer and New Frontiers Scientific Advisory Board member, said, “The presentations at the conference underscored how much 3D cell-based assays are becoming a part of the daily operations in drug discovery and drug safety testing to better classify compounds using more predictive models -- the key being robust, uniform, automation-friendly, and easy to use 3D cell models.”

The international New Frontiers in 3D conference will be hosted in 2017 at a European site to be determined, with plans to return to the US in 2018.

InSphero provides superior biological relevance to in vitro testing with its easy-to-use solutions for production, culture and assessment of organotypic 3D cell culture models. The company’s patented technologies include the 3D Select™ Process (pending) and scaffold-free 3D cell culture plates that enable large-scale, reproducible production of a broad range of assay-ready 3D InSight™ Microtissues derived from liver, pancreas, tumor, heart, brain, and skin. These models and contract research services utilizing them help to identify promising drugs and toxic liabilities with greater predictive power at early development stages, enabling better pre-clinical decision making, saving development cost, and shortening time to market. InSphero technologies drive significant findings in peer-reviewed journals, through collaborative projects such as EU-ToxRisk and HeCaToS, and have gained validation in the world’s largest government institutions and pharmaceutical, chemical and cosmetics companies. This 3D know-how is also being applied in the diagnostics field to aid development of personalized chemotherapeutic strategies for the treatment of cancer.

Founded in 2009, the privately held company is headquartered in Schlieren, Switzerland with subsidiaries in the United States (Brunswick, ME) and Waldshut, Germany. It has been recognized for its scientific and commercial achievements with a number of national and international awards.